Two Worlds: The Best Bad Game of All Time

There’s a new editorial over at WOW247 entitled “Two Worlds: The Best Bad Game of All Time” in which the author seeks to explain why the RPG is “the most fun he’s ever had with a terrible video game.” A backhanded compliment if I’ve ever heard one:

Terrible is not an understatement. Calling it rough would barely cover the first five minutes. Frame-rate doesn’t so much stutter as choke, walking animations feel like you’re striding through soup rather than air, and enemy AI is dull and brutish, displaying the sort of single-minded behaviour you’d find in early World of Warcraft. Magic isn’t worth the bother until many hours in, and even then the befuddling combination system you use to unlock powerful spells is, appropriately I suppose, downright arcane.

When I first played it I restarted the game and went through character creation again because I thought something had gone horribly wrong. But as it turns out it’s just that the character you see in the cutscenes is a default model with no relation to your own avatar. He looks like this. He’s on a mission to rescue his sister, or something. There’s also a guy with a hood called Gandohar whose function in the game, apart from looking pretty cool, is to never, ever betray you under any circumstances.

There’s a curious abundance of wolves and bears throughout the world, far more in fact than the local wildlife could sustain. Maybe tribes of wolves eat each other? Who knows. Enemies don’t respawn either. Not one of them. This renders huge swathes of the game world pretty dull if you’ve already cleared them. This is not necessarily a bad thing since the combat system is more reminiscent of Punch and Judy than Lord of the Rings. Thankfully you can teleport, and get around on horses.